_________________________
"Why am I still here?" Stefanie asked.
"We've finished the early bits where chemistry pretends to be physics," Stacy said pleasantly. "But there are a few things that chemistry insists on keeping to itself."
"But Mr. Atkinson sent me to find some interesting atoms and molecules," Stefanie said. "I'm very, very late for a very important date."
"I do appreciate that you can tell the difference between atoms and molecules, by the way," Stacy said. "It's quite important. Can you explain it to Sherlock?"
Stefanie looked over, and the cube that once was Sherlock was sitting on the desk next to her.
"Oh, I already know," Sherlock said in an American accent.
"Didn't you have an English accent before?" Stefanie asked.
"A molecule," he said, returning to his British accent, "is a group of two or more atoms that have bound together."
"Sounds very romantic," Sherlock continued, desperately trying to get his eyes to move in Stefanie's direction.
"Ew," she said.
"Very nice," Stacy continued. "Let me see what my notes say we haven't quite remembered. Ah, yes. There is the matter of mixtures."
"I believe there was also something about a boy named Kelvin," Stefanie said.
"Interjection!" Stacy said. "I forgot to mention Kelvin before Tom left."
Suddenly, Tom appeared in the doorway, peeking his head just inside the door.
"I know what Kelvin is," he said in a Vanessa voice. "It's the absolute temperature scale we learned in space. Zero Kelvin is minus 273.14 degrees Celsius. The scale has units the same size as Celsius degrees."
"You said you weren't going to use the metric system once we left the Briefing Room," a miniature Lane said, peaking out of Tom's hoodie pocket.
Then he disappeared down the hall.
"If all you need is a reminder of mixtures, I think I have that sorted," Stefanie said.
"Sherlock here is a heterogeneous mixture. He's a solid with uneven parts."
"Hey," Sherlock said. "I don't quite know what that means but it didn't sound nice."
"Your coffee," Stefanie continued, "is a homogeneous mixture, also called a solution. Even though it has different molecules in it, they have been mixed evenly throughout."
"You're doing very well," Stacy said, "but who said this was coffee?"
"Finally, there are pure substances, like distilled water, which is just water. Water is a molecule, a group of atoms bonded together like Sherlock said."
Sherlock had managed to turn his eyes toward Stefanie and wore an expression of utter amazement -- we think.
"The air we are breathing is a homogeneous mixture too, with different molecules like oxygen and nitrogen mixed evenly throughout."
"But if you had something made of just one type of atom," she continued, "like a block of iron, it would just be that element, a pure substance rather than a group of different molecules."
Both Stacy and Sherlock stared at Stefanie. She did not sound at all like herself.
"Just kidding," she said. "The answer is strawberry ice cream."
With that, they all breathed a sigh of relief and had a good chuckle.
"Breathing," Stacy continued laughing. "We're too small to breathe air here."
_________________________1. A Mole in the Lab
2. The Nuclear Cafe
3. Mr. Tom's Mild Ride
4. March of the Centipedes
5. A Thick Little Boy
6. Bubbles in Space
7. The Canceling Game
8. The Briefing Room
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